While they are more difficult to put inside a cabinet of curiosities, the amazing things that humans are capable are equal parts inspiring and astonishing. Today's tour features two such stories.
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Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. The best laid plans, as they say, often go awry. It doesn't matter how much we prepare. When the worst happens, there's little we can do to fight it. Sometimes the only option is to let a situation play out and hope for the best, even when hope seems to have run dry. King Philip of Spain had a plan. He had planned on harvesting the pearls found along the Mexican coast. Philip had built three ships in Acapulco, Mexico, smaller and easier to handle than the enormous galleons of most Armada's. They were called caravels, and because of their smaller size, they handled better in the shallow waters. In sixteen twelve, the completed ships took off, each one led by a different captain with a crew of Portuguese slaves. The slaves were sent into the water to dive down for the pearls at the bottom. The fleet worked its way up the Pacific coast, with one ship choosing to trade with local villages for their pearls. One of the captains, Alvarez de Cordon, was attacked in a trade gone bad and seriously wounded. While he recovered King Philip's two other ships headed farther north in search of more pearls, but one clipped a reef along the way. Its crew and captain fled the sinking vessel and joined the third ship, now the only one still on the water. Captain Juan at Torbay debated turning around and heading back home to Acapulco, but the promise of greater riches one out over reason. His ship continued north until it had reached an estuary that eventually led to a large inland sea, as he called it. He kept pushing the ship, skirting the edge of the sea and then up a river for a hundred miles before finally deciding to turn around. The journey down the river and back to the inland sea went fine. However, they've been traveling for weeks, and in that time the water levels had dropped. The ship was surrounded by sandbars on all sides, blocking their route back to the Pacific. For three days, they sailed the perimeter of the sea looking for a way out, until finally they had to accept the realization that they were trapped. Once they ran aground, the men packed up as much cargo as they could carry, and then they abandoned ship. Some of them perished on the trip to Guaymas, a Spanish settlement along the western coast of Mexico, although a good number of them survived. After a few months, they returned to Acapulco, but they never returned to their caravel. It had been lost to the sea. Then, in two thousand nine, journalist Robert Marcos made a discovery in southern California. He had been studying local petroglyphs, also known as pre historic rock paintings, when he discovered something odd about them. The people who had painted these hadn't drawn primitive animals or humans. They drawn a boat, a ship tall, with square sails and oars sticking out from the sides. These rocks caught the attention of the Maritime Museum of San Diego, who traveled down to get a look for themselves. Their initial observation was that the rock drawings depicted earlier expeditions from the mid fifteen hundreds, but no other ships had ever been found in the area. Except there was, and only six miles away. You see, for over two hundred years, a turbased ship had sat there in the middle of a California canyon, untouched by humanity and water. In eighteen seventy, one man told the New York newspaper that he'd witnessed the wreck of a gallant ship in the desert while traveling in southern California. That same year, a group of four explorers decided to see for themselves and described a ship whose bow and stern were plainly visit bowle as they said, almost two fifty nine miles from the Gulf of California, and one woman's husband claimed that he'd spotted an open boat, but big, with round metal discs on its sides, half buried in the sand of a narrow canyon. It seems that that petroglyph had painted an accurate picture, as they say. Unfortunately, getting close to a turn based ship is nearly impossible these days. The U. S. Navy has declared the canyon it rests within to be an active bombing range, meaning no more exploration can happen for the time being. Still, all signs point to the ancient ship still being there in the canyon, waiting for its crew and for the sea to come and set it free. How do you measure a man's life by his career or his family. In the case of one man, we might just want to start with how much he could bench press. Louis was born in Quebec in eighteen sixty three, but his parents couldn't have been more different. His father wasn't particularly tall or strong, but his mother was an impressive six ft one and weighed roughly two hundred sixty five pounds. According to the stories, she could toss a barrel of flour over her shoulder and carry it up several flights of stairs. And Louie's grandfather was no slatch either, weighing in at two hundred sixty pounds and looming over the rest of them at six ft four. Young Louis seemed to have inherited his mother's jeans. When he was twelve, he would show off to the workers on his family farm by carrying a calf around on his shoulders. One day, the calf decided enough was enough, so it kicked Louis in the back before escaping from that point on, Louis stuck to carrying a sack full of grain on his shoulder for a quarter mile at a time. Each day, he'd add another two pounds to the load and repeat the trip. His mother, a religious woman, suggested Louis grow out his hair like the Bible's Samson, and as his hair grew, so did his feats of strength. At the age of seventeen, he was put through the hardest test of his young life when a farmer's wagon nearby, heavy with cargo, had gotten stuck in the swampy mud. Unable to move it himself, the farmer asked Louie to help. The aspiring strongman came to the rescue, lifting the wagon out of the mire and garnering a bit of attention in the process. Capitalizing on his new found fame, Louis tried his luck against other actual strong men, but he didn't start out easy. His first match was against the strongest man in Canada, Michaux of Quebec. During their contest, the two thirty pound Louis best did Michou by lifting a five hundred pound granite boulder. Now officially the strongest man in Canada, Louis aimed higher. He wanted to see how he'd fare in America. His first competition had him lifting a fifteen hundred pound horse off the ground. A horse stood on a platform supported by two iron bars, which Louis held onto as he hoisted them. Eventually, Louie got married and went back to Canada to raise a family. He was also a bigger star there than he'd ever been in the United States. In eighties six Rematch against Me show, Louis lifted a two eighteen pound barbell one handed, as well as almost dred pounds with his back. His opponent missed the mark by three hundred pounds. Once again, Louis was crowned the strongest man in Canada. The trouble was there wasn't much money to be made as a celebrity strongman in Quebec, so Louis worked a regular job in between weightlifting gigs. After breaking up a knife fight between two men and then carrying them to the police station, one under each arm, he was offered a job on the force. He saved his money up, though, and within a few years he'd put enough together to open his own restaurant with an adjoining gym. Of course, in fact, Jim became so popular that both his strongman compatriots and up and comers would go there to work out, and it was common for one of the younger newcomers to challenge Louie to a match. The jovial teacher was only too happy to oblige, and he never lost. But nothing could take him away from his true passion professional competition. Louis went back on tour in eighteen eighty five against who's who of other strong men, one of whom could ben coins with his bare hands, and he beats every single one of them. But his greatest demonstration of strength came later on in his career. In one Louis went up against four draft horses, the kind that were used to haul farm equipment across fields. Louis held two ropes in each hand, and then the horses were whipped and cokes to pull as hard as they could in an attempt to get Louis to let go or maybe even tear him into but the strong man held firm, refusing to budge an inch or let go of the ropes. Four years later, in eighteen nine, he lifted over four thousand pounds with his back. The weight came in the form of eighteen men standing on a platform. Like I've said, this guy was incredibly strong. Yet for all of his strength, Louis Sere wasn't a particularly large man. He was only five ft eight five inches shorter than his own mother, and although he had gained considerable weight as he got older, he was often much slimmer than the men he competed against. In the end, though, Louis wasn't stronger than death, which came for him in nine When he died, he weighed over four hundred pounds and had retained the title of undefeated strongest man in Canada, possibly even the world. His funeral was attended by throngs of admirers, and Canada with a great length to honor the man who had performed what they considered to be his most important feat of strength. He lifted his entire country high above the rest of the world. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore which is a podcast, book series, and television show and you can learn all about it over at the world of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious, Yeah,